Review: Richard Feynman’s lost journey

When Richard Feynman was 11 years old, he was a keen collector of postage
stamps. He found some unusual triangular and diamond-shaped stamps from
a place called Tannu Tuva. His father showed him where it was – a little
purple splotch northwest of Outer Mongolia. At that time, in the late 1920s,
it was an independent country.

In the summer of 1977, Feynman, by then a professor of physics at the
California Institute of Technology, was eating dinner at his home in Altadena.
At the table was Feynman’s bongo-playing partner, Ralph Leighton, a local
teacher. He was impressing Feynman’s two children with his knowledge of
world geography.

‘So you think you know every country in the world?’ Feynman said. ‘Okay
then, what ever happened to Tannu Tuva?’

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‘Tannu what?’ said Leighton. ‘There’s no such country.’

‘Sure there is,’ said Feynman.

A quick inspection of the Encyclopaedia Britannica revealed a place
called Tuvinskaya ASSR to the north of the Tannu-Ola mountains, bang in
the heart of Asia. Though then a part of the Russian Federation within the
Soviet Union, once it had been an independent country called Tannu Tuva.

‘Look at this,’ said Feynman, pointing at a map of Asia. ‘The capital
is spelt K-Y-Z-Y-L! We must go there!’

So began a quest that lasted a decade to reach Tuva. Leighton and Feynman’s
enduring fantasy was to meet a nomadic Tuvan standing before his yurt. Their
holy grail became Kyzyl’s monument to the ‘centre of Asia’, erected in the
19th century by a mysterious English explorer who had determined that the
town was at the geographical centre of Asia.

Leighton and Feynman tried many ploys to get to Tuva. They even enrolled
as delegates at a throat-singing conference to be held in Hovd, Mongolia.
Throat-singing, a bizarre style peculiar to Tuva, involves making two notes
simultaneously. Alas, the conference was cancelled at the last minute.

At any time during the quest, Feynman, a Nobel-prizewinning physicist,
could have got to Kyzyl by pulling strings – contacting physicists in Moscow
and offering to give a series of lectures, for example. ‘But that way would
have been like riding to the summit of a mountain by helicopter,’ says Leighton.

During the 1980s, Feynman was often distracted from Tuva. Not only did
he serve on the Rogers Commission, set up to investigate the explosion of
the space shuttle Challenger, but he also underwent several major operations
for abdominal cancer. Feynman, as Leighton observes, was living on borrowed
time.

In 1988, Leighton and Feynman pulled off a coup, bringing to Los Angeles
‘Nomads of Eurasia’, an exhibition that included ancient Tuvan artefacts.
The Soviet authorities would be sure to reward them with a trip to Tuva,
they reasoned. But on 15 February 1988 – just three days before an invitation
arrived – Feynman’s borrowed time ran out.

Leighton went to Kyzyl without Feynman, and stood before the monument
to the centre of Asia. ‘It seemed like Richard’s grave,’ he says.

Tuva or Bust! is Leighton’s story in his own words. The distinctive
voice of Feynman, so charming in Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman, the earlier
collection of autobiographical anecdotes, is all but absent. Nevertheless,
‘Tuva or Bust!’ is an engaging read. Leighton provides yet more insight
into the mind of Feynman, for whom the unexpected made life worth living.

‘As it turned out, most of what happened on our quest got us no closer
to our goal,’ says Leighton. ‘But had we not embarked on the journey, we
would have missed it all.’

In the epilogue, Leighton writes: ‘Plans are now afoot to place a memorial
plaque to Richard Feynman in Kyzyl’s monument to the centre of Asia.’